jueves, 31 de mayo de 2012

Rudesheim,
Germany — This week I am leading a military-history tour on the Rhine
River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about
Europe’s current economic crises by ignoring the sophisticated barrage
of news analysis and instead just watching, listening, and talking to
people as you go down river.
Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is
landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like
Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit
agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a
part of the European Union.

"Axelrod
is endeavoring not to panic." So reads a sentence in John Heilemann's
exhaustive article on Barack Obama's campaign in this week's New York
magazine.
Heilemann is a fine reporter and was co-author with Time's Mark
Halperin of a best-selling book on the 2008 presidential campaign. While
his sympathies are undoubtedly with Obama, he does a fine job of
summarizing the arguments and tactics of both sides.

Dueling
charges of misogyny from the left and the right have become a
depressingly regular media circus -- one that, regardless of the real
issues, is mostly about moral posturing and political point-scoring.
Worse, both sides are feeding a toxic obsession with women-as-victims
and promoting a sexism of special treatment rather than equality.
Conservatives accuse liberals of ignoring and condoning sexist slurs
against right-wing women. Liberals accuse conservatives of ignoring and
condoning sexism except when it's directed at conservative women and can
be used as a weapon against the left.

Europe in limbo

Home and dry

Europe’s weaker economies are in the grip of a worsening credit crunch

| London, Madrid and Rome

THE joke recounted by the boss of a large Italian bank is an old one,
but it captures the moment. Two hikers are picnicking when a bear
appears. When one laces up his boots to run, his friend scoffs that he
can’t outrun a bear. The shod hiker retorts that it is not the bear he
needs to outrun, merely his fellow hiker. “We’re sitting at the picnic
with our boots still on,” says the bank boss.

The war over class war

Economic misunderstanding, not overblown rhetoric, is the real problem with the president

IT DOES not take much to be accused of waging class warfare in
America. The charge was levelled last year at Mitt Romney, of all the
unlikely leftist agitators, when he suggested that certain tax breaks
should be available only to those who earned less than $200,000. Rick
Santorum, one of Mr Romney’s rivals for the Republican nomination,
though he had promised never to use the word “class”, earned a similar
rebuke for pointing out that he came from humble origins, supposedly an
implicit contrast with Mr Romney, whose father was a governor and
cabinet secretary.

The economy

Upswing

Many states key to November’s election are doing better; whether the president can exploit that is another matter

ON MAY 24th Barack Obama launched a blistering attack on Mitt
Romney’s business background from the state fairgrounds in Iowa. A week
later Mr Romney returned the favour from a furniture warehouse in Las
Vegas, Nevada. The choice of venues was hardly random. Both are in
“swing” states that will help determine the outcome of this November’s
election. With the economy at the top of voters’ concerns, how the
recovery is seen to be faring in such states could have an outsize
influence on the result.

Bloodshed in Syria

Houla's horror

COULD the massacre on Friday of over 100 people in
Houla, an area of several villages close to Syria's third city of Homs,
mark a turning point in Syria's bloody uprising? Politicians around the
world expressed outrage after the UN confirmed that 49 children, many
under the age of 10, were among the dead, their bodies shown in pictures
and video footage. The UN Security Council met on Sunday evening to
condemn the killings while the American secretary of state, Hillary
Clinton, called for an end to president Bashar Assad's "rule by murder".

The future of the European Union

The choice

A limited version of federalism is a less miserable solution than the break-up of the euro

WHAT will become of the European Union? One road leads to the full
break-up of the euro, with all its economic and political repercussions.
The other involves an unprecedented transfer of wealth across Europe’s
borders and, in return, a corresponding surrender of sovereignty.
Separate or superstate: those seem to be the alternatives now.
For two crisis-plagued years Europe’s leaders have run away from this
choice. They say that they want to keep the euro intact—except,
perhaps, for Greece. But northern European creditors, led by Germany,
will not pay out enough to assure the euro’s survival, and southern
European debtors increasingly resent foreigners telling them how to run
their lives.

India's economy

A Bric hits the wall

by P.F. | PUNE

INDIA’S economy has had some
bad economic ideas inflicted on it over the past century, from imperial
neglect to the cult of the village and big-ticket socialism. Maybe the
concept of BRICs—a handful of emerging economies including India that
were destined for fast growth—should be added to the list. It led to a
bubble of complacency that is now being popped rather brutally. Growth
in India was 5.3% in the three months to March—worse than the 6%
expected, below the prior quarter and way below the close-to-double
digit rates that were meant to be preordained and propel India to
economic super-power status.

Arizona Governor Signs Groundbreaking School Choice Plan

PHOENIX — Gov.
Jan Brewer signed into law yesterday the expansion of an Arizona school
choice program, explicitly making children of active military members
eligible to participate — a first nationwide. The expansion of the
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program also makes students in failing
public schools or school districts and those adopted out of the state
foster care system eligible starting in the 2013-14 school year.

US: The Fiscal Effects of School Choice Programs on Public School Districts – by Benjamin Scafidi

The
public education establishment routinely argues that school choice
programs, where “the money follows the child,” harm students who remain
in public schools. They suggest that students who remain in public
schools are worse off because there will be fewer resources available
for their education once some children depart public school districts
via school choice. That is, there will be fewer students and,
consequently, fewer taxpayer dollars to cover the substantial fixed
costs of running a school.

Would you happily sign an IOU for $126,000 to allow Barack Obama to keep his Big Spender status going? In some ways, that’s the bottom line on how people are going to vote on November 6th. That’s what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates Obama’s proposed deficits, from 2011 through 2020, will add to a family of four’s share of America’s liabilities.

Last week, the Census Bureau made
nationwide headlines when it announced that for the first time since
Native Americans were the dominant race, minorities make up more than 50
percent of births in the U.S. It defines a minority as anyone who is
not single-race white and is not Hispanic.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Jim Cramer Is Predicting Bank Runs In Spain And Italy And Financial Anarchy Throughout Europe

During
an appearance on Meet The Press on Sunday, Jim Cramer of CNBC boldly
predicted that "financial anarchy" is coming to Europe and that there
will be "bank runs" in Spain and Italy in the next few weeks. This is
very strong language for the most famous personality on the most watched
financial news channel in the United States to be using. In fact, if
Cramer is not careful, people will start accusing him of sounding just like The Economic Collapse Blog.
It may not happen in "the next few weeks", but the truth is that the
European banking system is in a massive amount of trouble and if Greece
does leave the euro it is going to cause a tremendous loss of confidence
in banks in countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal. There are
already rumors that the "smart money" is pulling out of Spanish and
Italian banks. So could we see some of these banks collapse? Would
they get bailed out if they do collapse? It is so hard to predict
exactly how "financial anarchy" will play out, but it is becoming
increasingly clear that the European financial system is heading for a
massive amount of pain.

Obama's Five Trillion Dollar Lie

Why
isn't the U.S. economy in a depression right now? The number one
reason is because the federal government has stolen more than five
trillion dollars from future generations since Barack Obama was elected
and has used that money to pump up our grossly inflated standard of
living. Whether the federal government spends money wisely or
foolishly, the truth is that the vast majority of it still ends up in
the pockets of the American people who then use it to buy the things
they need for their daily lives. If the U.S. government had not
borrowed and spent an extra five trillion dollars that we did not have
over the past several years, we would be in the middle of a rip-roaring
economic depression right now. So any talk that Barack Obama is
"improving the economy" is a total farce. It is a five trillion dollar
lie. The reality is that Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress have been
stealing trillions of dollars from future generations in order to make
things tolerable in the present. If the federal government adopted a
balanced budget next year, the debt-fueled prosperity that we are
currently enjoying would start disappearing very rapidly and all hell
would break loose in America.

When The Derivatives Market Crashes (And It Will) U.S. Taxpayers Will Be On The Hook

Warren
Buffett once said that derivatives are "financial weapons of mass
destruction", and that statement is more true today than it ever has
been before. Recently, JP Morgan made national headlines when it
announced that it was going to take a 2 billion dollar loss
from derivatives trades gone bad. Well, it turns out that JP Morgan
did not tell us the whole truth. As you will see later in this article,
most analysts are estimating that the losses will eventually be far
larger than 2 billion dollars. But no matter how bad things get for JP
Morgan, it will not be allowed to fail. JP Morgan is the largest bank
in the United States, so it is essentially the "granddaddy" of the too big to fail banks.
If JP Morgan gets to the point where it is about to collapse, the U.S.
government and the Federal Reserve will rush in to save it.

How The Super Rich Avoid Taxes Even As They Demand That The Rest Of Us Pay More

The
way that we tax people in the United States is fundamentally broken and
should be completely discarded. The U.S. tax code is absolutely
riddled with loopholes that allow the super rich to legally avoid taxes
while many of the rest of us are being taxed into oblivion.
In our system of taxation, middle class families that work hard and try
to play by the rules are deeply penalized while those that are willing
to abuse the system make out like bandits. There is something
fundamentally wrong with a system that enables wealthy politicians such
as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to pay a smaller percentage of their
incomes in taxes than millions of middle class families. Mitt Romney
has millions of dollars
parked down in the Cayman Islands and in other tax havens. He does
this to avoid taxes. Unfortunately, most Americans do not have the
resources to funnel money through offshore tax havens.